Some weeks have passed since Graham's talk with Isaura in the garden; he
has not visited the villa since. His cousins the D'Altons have passed
through Paris on their way to Italy, meaning to stay a few days; they
stayed nearly a month, and monopolized much of Graham's companionship.
Both these were reasons why, in the habitual society of the Duke,
Graham's persuasion that he was not yet free to court the hand of Isaura
became strengthened, and with that persuasion necessarily came a question
equally addressed to his conscience. "If not yet free to court her hand,
am I free to expose myself to the temptation of seeking to win her
affection?" But when his cousin was gone, his heart began to assert its
own rights, to argue its own case, and suggest modes of reconciling its
dictates to the obligations which seemed to oppose them. In this
hesitating state of mind he received the following note:--
VILLA ------, LAC D'ENGHIEN.
MY DEAR MR. VANE,--We have retreated from Paris to the banks of this
beautiful little lake. Come and help to save Frank and myself from
quarrelling with each other, which, until the Rights of Women are firmly
established, married folks always will do when left to themselves,
especially if they are still lovers, as Frank and I are. Love is a
terribly quarrelsome thing. Make us a present of a few days out of your
wealth of time. We will visit Montmorency and the haunts of Rousseau,
sail on the lake at moonlight, dine at gypsy restaurants under trees not
yet embrowned by summer heats, discuss literature and politics,
"Shakspeare and the musical glasses,"--and be as sociable and pleasant as
Boccaccio's tale-tellers, at Fiesole. We shall be but a small party,
only the Savarins, that unconscious sage and humourist Signora Venosta,
and that dimple-cheeked Isaura, who embodies the song of nightingales and
the smile of summer. Refuse, and Frank shall not have an easy moment
till he sends in his claims for thirty millions against the Alabama.
Yours, as you behave,
LIZZIE MORLEY.
Graham did not refuse. He went to Enghien for four days and a quarter.
He was under the same roof as Isaura. Oh, those happy days! so happy
that they defy description. But though to Graham the happiest days he
had ever known, they were happier still to Isaura. There were drawbacks
to his happiness, none to hers,--drawbacks partly from reasons the weight
of which the reader will estimate later; partly from reasons the reader
may at once comprehend and assess. In the sunshine of her joy, all the
vivid colourings of Isaura's artistic temperament came forth, so that
what I may call the homely, domestic woman-side of her nature faded into
shadow. If, my dear reader, whether you be man or woman, you have come
into familiar contact with some creature of a genius to which, even
assuming that you yourself have a genius in its own way, you have no
special affinities, have you not felt shy with that creature? Have you
not, perhaps, felt how intensely you could love that creature, and
doubted if that creature could possibly love you? Now I think that
shyness and that disbelief are common with either man or woman, if,
however conscious of superiority in the prose of life, he or she
recognizes inferiority in the poetry of it. And yet this self-abasement
is exceedingly mistaken. The poetical kind of genius is so grandly
indulgent, so inherently deferential, bows with such unaffected modesty
to the superiority in which it fears it may fail (yet seldom does fail),
--the superiority of common-sense. And when we come to women, what
marvellous truth is conveyed by the woman who has had no superior in
intellectual gifts among her own sex! Corinne, crowned at the Capitol,
selects out of the whole world as the hero of her love no rival poet and
enthusiast, but a cold-blooded, sensible Englishman.
Graham Vane, in his strong masculine form of intellect--Graham Vane, from
whom I hope much, if he live to fulfil his rightful career--had, not
unreasonably, the desire to dominate the life of the woman whom he
selected as the partner of his own; but the life of Isaura seemed to
escape him. If at moments, listening to her, he would say to himself,
"What a companion! life could never be dull with her," at other moments
he would say, "True, never dull, but would it be always safe?" And then
comes in that mysterious power of love which crushes all beneath its
feet, and makes us end self-commune by that abject submission of reason,
which only murmurs, "Better be unhappy with the one you love than happy
with one whom you do not." All such self-communes were unknown to
Isaura. She lived in the bliss of the hour. If Graham could have read
her heart, he would have dismissed all doubt whether he could dominate
her life. Could a Fate or an Angel have said to her, "Choose,--on one
side I promise you the glories of a Catalani, a Pasta, a Sappho, a De
Stael, a Georges Sand, all combined into one immortal name; or, on the
other side, the whole heart of the man who would estrange himself from
you if you had such combination of glories,"--her answer would have
brought Graham Vane to her feet. All scruples, all doubts, would have
vanished; he would have exclaimed, with the generosity inherent in the
higher order of man, "Be glorious, if your nature wills it so. Glory
enough to me that you would have resigned glory itself to become mine."
But how is it that men worth a woman's loving become so diffident when
they love intensely? Even in ordinary cases of love there is so
ineffable a delicacy in virgin woman, that a man, be he how refined
soever, feels himself rough and rude and coarse in comparison; and while
that sort of delicacy was pre-eminent in this Italian orphan, there came,
to increase the humility of the man so proud and so confident in himself
when he had only men to deal with, the consciousness that his
intellectual nature was hard and positive beside the angel-like purity
and the fairy-like play of hers.
There was a strong wish on the part of Mrs. Morley to bring about the
union of these two. She had a great regard and a great admiration for
both. To her mind, unconscious of all Graham's doubts and prejudices,
they were exactly suited to each other. A man of intellect so cultivated
as Graham's, if married to a commonplace English "Miss," would surely
feel as if life had no sunshine and no flowers. The love of an Isaura
would steep it in sunshine, pave it with flowers. Mrs. Morley admitted
--all American Republicans of gentle birth do admit--the instincts which
lead "like" to match with "like," an equality of blood and race. With
all her assertion of the Rights of Woman, I do not think that Mrs. Morley
would ever have conceived the possibility of consenting that the richest
and prettiest and cleverest girl in the States could become the wife of a
son of hers if the girl had the taint of negro blood, even though shown
nowhere save the slight distinguishing hue of her finger-nails. So had
Isaura's merits been threefold what they were and she had been the
wealthy heiress of a retail grocer, this fair Republican would have
opposed (more strongly than many an English duchess, or at least a Scotch
duke, would do, the wish of a son), the thought of an alliance between
Graham Vane and the grocer's daughter! But Isaura was a Cicogna, an
offspring of a very ancient and very noble house. Disparities of
fortune, or mere worldly position, Mrs. Morley supremely despised. Here
were the great parities of alliance,--parities in years and good looks
and mental culture. So, in short, she in the invitation given to them
had planned for the union between Isaura and Graham. To this plan she
had an antagonist, whom she did not even guess, in Madame Savarin. That
lady, as much attached to Isaura as was Mrs. Morley herself, and still
more desirous of seeing a girl, brilliant and parentless, transferred
from the companionship of Signora Venosta to the protection of a husband,
entertained no belief in the serious attentions of Graham Vane. Perhaps
she exaggerated his worldly advantages, perhaps she undervalued the
warmth of his affections; but it was not within the range of her
experience, confined much to Parisian life, nor in harmony with her
notions of the frigidity and morgue of the English national character,
that a rich and high-born young man, to whom a great career in practical
public life was predicted, should form a matrimonial alliance with a
foreign orphan girl, who, if of gentle birth, had no useful connections,
would bring no correspondent dot, and had been reared and intended for
the profession of the stage. She much more feared that the result of any
attentions on the part of such a man would be rather calculated to
compromise the orphan's name, or at least to mislead her expectations,
than to secure her the shelter of a wedded home. Moreover, she had
cherished plans of her own for Isaura's future. Madame Savarin had
conceived for Gustave Rameau a friendly regard, stronger than that which
Mrs. Morley entertained for Graham Vane, for it was more motherly.
Gustave had been familiarized to her sight and her thoughts since he had
first been launched into the literary world under her husband's auspices;
he had confided to her his mortification in his failures, his joy in his
successes. His beautiful countenance, his delicate health, his very
infirmities and defects, had endeared him to her womanly heart. Isaura
was the wife of all others who, in Madame Savarin's opinion, was made for
Rameau. Her fortune, so trivial beside the wealth of the Englishman,
would be a competence to Rameau; then that competence might swell into
vast riches if Isaura succeeded on the stage. She found with extreme
displeasure that Isaura's mind had become estranged from the profession
to which she had been destined, and divined that a deference to the
Englishman's prejudices had something to do with that estrangement. It
was not to be expected that a Frenchwoman, wife to a sprightly man of
letters, who had intimate friends and allies in every department of the
artistic world, should cherish any prejudice whatever against the
exercise of an art in which success achieved riches and renown; but she
was prejudiced, as most Frenchwomen are, against allowing to unmarried
girls the same freedom and independence of action that are the rights of
women--French women--when married; and she would have disapproved the
entrance of Isaura on her professional career until she could enter it as
a wife, the wife of an artist, the wife of Gustave Rameau.
Unaware of the rivalry between these friendly diplomatists and schemers,
Graham and Isaura glided hourly more and more down the current, which as
yet ran smooth. No words by which love is spoken were exchanged between
them; in fact, though constantly together, they were very rarely, and
then but for moments, alone with each other. Mrs. Morley artfully
schemed more than once to give them such opportunities for that mutual
explanation of heart which, she saw, had not yet taken place; with art
more practised and more watchful, Madame Savarin contrived to baffle her
hostess's intention. But, indeed, neither Graham nor Isaura sought to
make opportunities for themselves. He, as we know, did not deem himself
wholly justified in uttering the words of love by which a man of honour
binds himself for life; and she!--what girl pure-hearted and loving truly
does not shrink from seeking the opportunities which it is for the man to
court? Yet Isaura needed no words to tell her that she was loved,--no,
nor even a pressure of the hand, a glance of the eye; she felt it
instinctively, mysteriously, by the glow of her own being in the presence
of her lover. She knew that she herself could not so love unless she
were beloved.
Here woman's wit is keener and truthfuller than man's. Graham, as I have
said, did not feel confident that he had reached the heart of Isaura. He
was conscious that he had engaged her interest, that he had attracted her
fancy; but often, when charmed by the joyous play of her imagination, he
would sigh to himself, "To natures so gifted what single mortal can be
the all in all."
They spent the summer mornings in excursions round the beautiful
neigbbourhood, dined early, and sailed on the calm lake at moonlight.
Their talk was such as might be expected from lovers of books in summer
holidays. Savarin was a critic by profession; Graham Vane, if not that,
at least owed such literary reputation as he had yet gained to essays in
which the rare critical faculty was conspicuously developed.
It was pleasant to hear the clash of these two minds encountering each
other; they differed perhaps less in opinions than in the mode by which
opinions are discussed. The Englishman's range of reading was wider than
the Frenchman's, and his scholarship more accurate; but the Frenchman had
a compact neatness of expression, a light and nimble grace, whether in
the advancing or the retreat of his argument, which covered deficiencies,
and often made them appear like merits. Graham was compelled, indeed, to
relinquish many of the forces of superior knowledge or graver eloquence,
which with less lively antagonists he could have brought into the field,
for the witty sarcasm of Savarin would have turned them aside as pedantry
or declamation. But though Graham was neither dry nor diffuse, and the
happiness at his heart brought out the gayety of humour which had been
his early characteristic, and yet rendered his familiar intercourse
genial and playful, still there was this distinction between his humour
and Savarin's wit,--that in the first there was always something earnest,
in the last always something mocking. And in criticism Graham seemed
ever anxious to bring out a latent beauty, even in writers comparatively
neglected; Savarin was acutest when dragging forth a blemish never before
discovered in writers universally read.
Graham did not perhaps notice the profound attention with which Isaura
listened to him in these intellectual skirmishes with the more glittering
Parisian. There was this distinction she made between him and Savarin,--
when the last spoke she often chimed in with some happy sentiment of her
own; but she never interrupted Graham, never intimated a dissent from his
theories of art, or the deductions he drew from them; and she would
remain silent and thoughtful for some minutes when his voice ceased.
There was passing from his mind into hers an ambition which she imagined,
poor girl, that he would be pleased to think he had inspired, and which
might become a new bond of sympathy between them. But as yet the
ambition was vague and timid,--an idea or a dream to be fulfilled in some
indefinite future.
The last night of this short-lived holiday-time, the party, after staying
out on the lake to a later hour than usual, stood lingering still on the
lawn of the villa; and their host, who was rather addicted to superficial
studies of the positive sciences, including, of course, the most popular
of all, astronomy, kept his guests politely listening to speculative
conjectures on the probable size of the inhabitants of Sirius, that very
distant and very gigantic inhabitant of heaven who has led philosophers
into mortifying reflections upon the utter insignificance of our own poor
little planet, capable of producing nothing greater than Shakspeares and
Newtons, Aristotles and Caesars,--mannikins, no doubt, beside intellects
proportioned to the size of the world in which they flourish.
As it chanced, Isaura and Graham were then standing close to each other
and a little apart from the rest. "It is very strange," said Graham,
laughing low, "how little I care about Sirius. He is the sun of some
other system, and is perhaps not habitable at all, except by Salamanders.
He cannot be one of the stars with which I have established familiar
acquaintance, associated with fancies and dreams and hopes, as most of us
do, for instance, with Hesperus, the moon's harbinger and comrade. But
amid all those stars there is one--not Hesperus--which has always had
from my childhood a mysterious fascination for me. Knowing as little of
astrology as I do of astronomy, when I gaze upon that star I become
credulously superstitious, and fancy it has an influence on my life.
Have you, too, any favourite star?"
"Yes," said Isaura; "and I distinguish it now, but I do not even know its
name, and never would ask it."
"So like me. I would not vulgarize my unknown source of beautiful
illusions by giving it the name it takes in technical catalogues. For
fear of learning that name I never have pointed it out to any one before.
I too at this moment distinguish it apart from all its brotherhood. Tell
me which is yours."
Isaura pointed and explained. The Englishman was startled. By what
strange coincidence could they both have singled out from all the host of
heaven the same favourite star? "Cher Vane," cried Savarin, "Colonel
Morley declares that what America is to the terrestrial system Sirius is
to the heavenly. America is to extinguish Europe, and then Sirius is to
extinguish the world."
"Not for some millions of years; time to look about us," said the
Colonel, gravely. "But I certainly differ from those who maintain that
Sirius recedes from us. I say that he approaches. The principles of a
body so enlightened must be those of progress." Then addressing Graham
in English, he added, "there will be a mulling in this fogified planet
some day, I predicate. Sirius is a keener!"
"I have not imagination lively enough to interest myself in the destinies
of Sirius in connection with our planet at a date so remote," said
Graham, smiling. Then he added in a whisper to Isaura, "My imagination
does not carry me further than to wonder whether this day twelvemonth--
the 8th of July-we two shall both be singling out that same star, and
gazing on it as now, side by side."
This was the sole utterance of that sentiment in which the romance of
love is so rich that the Englishman addressed to Isaura during those
memorable summer days at Enghien.